There was a small argument afterwards, in which the two guards debated over who would 'guard' me while we escorted Kang Jiesu back to his room. Apparently, one of them still needed to keep watch in front of the Crown Prince's room, which meant that only one of them had the flexibility to go on patrol.
The evil guard's mood was particurly foul, and he apparently lost all patience with his junior.
He ordered the nice guard to stay behind and wait. Instead, he would be the one to personally escort the maid and the Otherworlder, tacitly implying that he didn't trust anyone else to do the task correctly. It was actually quite ironic — we had almost gaslighted him into thinking that he was the one mishandling the situation, even though he was the closest to understanding my true intentions.
The nameless blonde guard smiled at me wryly.
"Sorry Miss Hana. I'll look for your pendant ter." He said.
"Thanks. Do you know where to find me?"
"I think I know where the girls' dorms are. If I find your pendant, I'll pay a visit."
"Okay. I really appreciate it. Thank you for helping me."
He had a sparkling puppy-dog expression on his face.
+ + +
Kang Jiesu's expression, meanwhile, was quizzical.
It was more than obvious that the two guards had completely different attitudes towards me, and the situation was significantly more complex than it may have appeared at first gnce. He could probably tell that the evil guard had the higher rank, although the junior guard had jumped in to help me.
The situation was ambiguous enough that his intervention had certainly done something, although it wasn't entirely clear what had happened other than the obvious fact that the shackles had been removed from my wrists.
"We're. Going. Back. To. Your. Room." The evil guard tried to communicate with Kang Jiesu by raising his voice and splitting his sentence apart into individual sylbles. His tone was rather condescending, much in the way that people often tried to speak to the senile elderly seniors who were hard of hearing.
However, Kang Jiesu did not seem to understand the message.
He grabbed my hands this time.
"Mine (object). Give back." My cssmate repeated his earlier statement.
"No." The guard refused adamantly. "Not yours. Maybe if you ask ter, but not now."
He came in between us, physically blocking Kang Jiesu and preventing him from holding my hand.
The nguage barrier made this entire situation all the more ridiculous. It was almost like he was the hand-holding police, trying to separate two rutting animals that couldn't be trusted together in the middle of spring. He seemed to think that my cssmate was some kind of testosterone-drive bull who randomly lusted at women, and he circled in between us like a Spanish matador waving a bright red muleta to distract the beast from its target.
Instead, he started guiding the two of us down the hallway, trying his best to shepherd us in the rough direction of the Emerald Room. Fortunately, it wasn't too far away from the Crown Prince's chambers, but my cssmate had no way of knowing the guard's intentions.
Kang Jiesu was about to protest, but I fshed him an apologetic look.
He quieted down when he realized that I was complying without resistance.
+ + +
Our walk through the pace halls was needless to say, extremely awkward.
In the first pce, I had significant wardrobe malfunctions, so I was quite pre-occupied with securing parts of my outfit so that there wouldn't be anything too scandalous exposed.
Kang Jiesu stared at me from a distance, and it was impossible for know exactly what he was thinking.
He was quiet.
Our guard, on the other hand, continued to throw unhappy gres between the two of us. He seemed to realize that Kang Jiesu would essentially follow me wherever I went, so he maniputed me like a carrot on a string in order to guide my cssmate through the maze-like hallways. His handling was quite rough — in fact, the opposite of the way a dy ought to be treated — and Kang Jiesu's attitude steadily grew darker and darker when it became increasingly certain that I was definitely being held against my will, even if there were no tangible chains or shackles on my wrists.
From his perspective, I must have been abused quite terribly over the span of the day.
Given the state of my clothes and the traces of blood, it was probably very easy to picture something especially horrific and terrible. After all, what combination of activities could possibly result in shredded clothes, dried blood, and metal chains? There weren't many pusible expnations, and the only minor detail that was out of pce was the fact that I wasn't screaming and kicking and fighting.
My childhood friend continued to walk silently.
It did not take very long before we made it back to entrance of the Emerald Room.
The evil guard quietly nudged my cssmate forward.
"We're here. You can go now." He told him.
+ + +
Kang Jiesu definitely recognized the location, but he did not step forward to open the door.
He looked back at me and repeated his request for the third time.
"Mine (object). Give back." Kang Jiesu said.
"No." The guard told him firmly.
Simple yes-no statements were well within my childhood friend's Galuterican vocabury, and Kang Jiesu certainly understood that his request had been refused. However, it readily apparent from the situation that the guard would be taking me to another unspeakable destination after we parted ways with Kang Jiesu. For all my cssmate could infer, I might even be taken the pace dungeon... or somepce worse far worse.
"那么, 让我请你们喝一杯茶" (Then, let me invite you in for some tea).
He pced his hand on the guard's vambraces and pulled him towards his room.
The guard seemed surprised, but he did not resist particurly hard. The Emerald Room was a dead end, so there really wasn't any harm if we stepped inside for a few moments. We would continue on our original itinerary shortly afterwards, and it was a very small price to pay in order to score easy customer satisfaction points with the foreigner.
Kang Jiesu opened the door, and he led all of us inside like a long daisy chain.
+ + +
"How'd you get lost looking for the bathroom, Kang?" A melodious voice immediately asked in Mandarin.
"It took you long enough." Another boy added.
There were other people in Kang Jiesu's room, which certainly caught the guard and me by surprise.
A small crowd of Otherworlders had apparently gathered in the Emerald Room, which frankly was never supposed to have happened. According to the Majordomo's briefing from the other day, the pace servants had all been instructed to prevent the Otherworlders from congregating as a group. We were supposed to do this tacitly without them noticing, by redirecting them to different locations so that they didn't cross paths and ensuring that they were always supervised when they were in a group. It was a divide-and-conquer strategy, in the sense that it would be difficult for the Otherworlders coordinate effectively if they weren't given an opportunity to deliberate in private.
I gnced around the room.
There was not a single maid present, and somehow my cssmates had managed to slip away from their assigned escorts.
Altogether, this was incredibly bizarre.
The css queen, Hong Baiye, was sitting in a luxurious chair at the center of the living room.
"Seems like you caught some trouble again?" She sighed.
"Some help would be nice," Kang Jiesu admitted.
"The work that you put me through..." Hong Baiye compined.
Without warning, a slinking figure crept behind the evil guard and lifted a frying pan.
—Clunk.
It crashed straight into the back of the guard's head with a frightening amount of force.
The guard dropped straight to the ground like a sack full of lead.
I flinched reflexively.
A rge plush fox tail swished in the shadows behind me, and I spun around to face the perpetrator who had sprung the sudden attack. The lighting was poor, but I recognized a pair of pink cat ears atop a totally unfamiliar face. By process of elimination, I could deduce that this was the Ruby Princess — the mysterious cssmate who had become a nekomimi that could talk to animals.
"Jeez, were you trying to kill him?" My cssmate Lu Liwang said.
"Whoops! My bad. I was trying to hold back, but I used too much strength." The Ruby Princess confessed with exasperation.
"You have to be careful," Hong Baiye reminded the fox. "You're level 37. That's like 2^20 or 1,048,576x stronger than the average human guard in this universe."
"...Sorry." The foxgirl's tail sank sullenly.
The ice queen turned to look at me.
She gestured at my body rather carelessly.
"What about the girl, Kang?" Hong Baiye asked. "Are we disposing of her too?"
?
